Those who find evolution convincing need to rethink it a lot more carefully because the evidence is really not there to the extent you think it is. I suspect you are accepting as evidence all sorts of assumptions, speculations and hypotheses that are not evidence, and are taking most of it on faith in spite of yourself.

Saturday, October 8, 2016

Yes, the only reality is the stacks of rocks.

The direction I took with that argument was to try to show the implications of the fact that the actual and only evidence we have on which the Geological Timescale is constructed, is the rock strata, usually called the Geologic Column, that the whole idea of time periods is based on that stack of rocks and on nothing else, but that in reality there is no physical way for the scenes imputed to the time periods to have become reduced to the actual layers of rock that represent them.

The scenes or landscapes I'm referring to are those fictional illustrations you may have seen here or there, depictions of whatever environment is supposed by standard Geology to have characterized a particular time period, a particular kind of landscape with particular plants and animals, as determined by the fossils found in the rock layer of formation of layers that represents that time period.

Here's a typical example, this one of the Permian Period:

So I put together a cartoon to show the basic idea that there were never scenes or landscapes represented by the rocks, but only the rocks themselves, which would be huge flat featureless expanses of sediment.

Even if there had been a landscape for a particular time period, since it all has to reduce down to the flat rock that is its only evidence, by the end of any "time period" there would be nothing left of the landscape but the flat sediment that will eventually become the rock.

Since the strata do not occur everywhere on earth, presumably there would also be areas of chaotic deposition as well, if the cause was the Flood, but there is no evidence of a normal landscape apart from the strata, although it must be assumed in the standard interpretive scheme, assumed but nothing more, because all the evidence of the time periods is contained in the layered rocks. It is the strata that contain the fossils, it is the strata that are dated, all schematic representations of the Geological Timescale identify it in terms of the stratified rocks.

But again, the rocks are the ONLY evidence. And what that means in terms of the historical situation is that if there was once upon a time a landscape in which creatures lived, in a particular slice of time, called Cambrian, or Devonian, or Permian, or Jurassic etc., at the very end of that period there had to be nothing but this expanse of sediment and no remains whatever of the supposed landscape, And that must be the case because all there is now is an expanse of flat rock. Before it was rock it had to be an expanse of flat sediment, no doubt wet sediment, and if we are to imagine a landscape that got reduced down to that flat wet sediment we have to imagine that everything that had lived in that landscape left no trace whatever, assuming anything specific lived in that hypothetical window of time.

But we will be reminded that the surface of some of those rocks is marked by animal tracks, animal burrows and other signs of life, and raindrop impressions and ripple impressions, which are interpreted by the standard theory to be evidence that there did exist a landscape that represents the time period.

Which led me to another part of the argument: the observation that those tracks and burrows and raindrops and ripples were clearly formed on a huge flat featureless surface and not in any kind of normal landscape with plants and hills and valleys and so on. This is apparent, after all, from the simple fact that they are embedded in the surface of a huge flat rock, or burrow into a huge flat rock. All of such tracks that are found in the strata, all the burrows, all the raindrop impressions, all the ripples: they all occur on these flat featureless expanses of sediment that are now rock in which they are preserved. So these very phenomena that are taken for evidence of a time period with its own kinds of plants and animals, are really evidence against the idea. At the moment they were impressed into the sediment there was no such landscape, only the vast expanse of sediment itself that became the vast flat featureless rock. So either somehow the assumed landscape was transformed into the rock, or there never was a landscape at all, just the vast expanse of sediment. Which is of course consistent with the Flood explanation and not the time period explanation. The time periods are pure interpretation, pure theory, based entirely on qualities of the rock itself plus its fossil contents. If it's limestone it must have been formed a shallow sea for instance, if it's sandstone with a certain angle of crossbedding it had to have been sanddunes on that very site, that somehow got compressed into rock with flat top and flat bottom. And so it goes..

The arguments on that thread revolved around efforts to show me how the expected landscape that represents a time period could have been reduced to an expanse of rock, in fact a whole stack of such rocks that was once a whole stack of such landscapes.

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2 Peter 3:3-7 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as [they were] from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water. Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

MOST IMPORTANT BLOG POSTS

There's something very wrong with the thinking of a Christian who is more worried about being "fooled by God" in an erroneous judgment about, say, a radiometric dating conclusion than he is about being "fooled by God" in the Bible, very wrong because Christians supposedly believe the Bible to be inspired by God, but science is done by fallible human beings.===========================

You want me to respect science. How can I respect Geology when it accepts the idea that a worldwide stack of different kinds of sedimentary rock represents different time periods of millions of years each, and that the bazillions of catastrophically tossed and tumbled dead things contained in them, often in batches of their own kind, represent particular life forms that lived in each "time" period -- all while smugly proclaiming "there is no evidence" for a global Flood. This is so stupid it is amazing that it was ever entertained, but there it is, today's Dogma of Geology. I'm sure they do solid science in spite of it of course, kind of around and under and between it.

EVOLUTIONISM IS A STRONGHOLD TO BE SPIRITUALLY TOPPLED

2 Corinthians 10:3-5 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

PRAY IT DOWN!

About This Blog

What I want to do here is try to do my best job of stating my own favorite arguments against evolution. There are a couple I think really, logically speaking, ought to bring the whole system crashing down but of course it isn't that easy, human stubbornness being what it is.

There's the geological argument which is basically that you can see with your naked eyes that this world once went through a global Flood, as the Bible reports. That takes care all by itself of the whole Old Earth theorizing that evolution depends on.

And there's the biological argument: It is known that genes DON'T increase although evolution depends on increase. The MORE evolved a species the LESS genetic capacity to evolve it actually has. Breeders certainly know this; and conservationists also know this because genetic depletion in highly specialized species (such as the cheetah) makes them vulnerable to extinction rather than candidates for further variation.

I hope to post on these and other arguments as time permits.

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Ah heck, Mr. Dawkins, we CAN TOO imagine macroevolution by natural selection, same as you can. We can follow out the same Rube-Goldberg sequence of improbable events, acting in a homologically graded series of imaginatively fleshed-out fossils, events that have never been observed in living reality, to the same preconceived conclusion you come to. Our problem is that we know it flies in the face of probability, reason, logic and any other law of rational inquiry and science that may exist, AND that there is no evidence for it, whereas design OBVIOUSLY implies a designer -- obviously, intuitively, rationally, logically, reasonably and probabilistically -- and I'd add "absolutely" if I could get away with it.

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Thinking about the implications of the Biblical creation can sometimes draw you close to God in a way that has to be described as worship. That's the main reason for doing it I think.

IT ISN'T FOR LACK OF EXPOSURE TO SCIENCE

A description of my own experience in answer to the usual denigrating assumption that creationism requires ignorance of science -- not that I claim any scientific sophistication of course, merely a basic understanding of some basic facts and principles.Before I became a Christian I absorbed a lot of the thinking about evolution and tried my best to understand it. Even then I was often frustrated thatevidence trails could just about never be found or followed out to any kind of certainty and I found that I always had to give up trying to follow them and just take the conclusions of the scientists pretty much on faith.I definitely had an interest in understanding evolution. I believed in it; I wanted also to understand it, but I found my desire thwarted by the lack of evidence. Iread the Origin of Species, I read lots of stuff by Stephen Jay Gould, very entertaining stuff, I read Skeptical Inquiry regularly, and so on. I investigated the science claims for evolution about as far as the average intelligent non-scientist can be expected to.

It was only after I became a Christian that I got into studying the creationist answers and took seriously my earlier experience offrustration with the lack of evidence for evolution.I strongly wish that those who find it convincing would rethink it a lot more carefully because the evidence is really not there to the extent you think it is, I suspect you are accepting as evidence all sorts of clever speculations that are not evidence, and are taking most of it on faith in spite of yourself.